Boris Johnson Admits COP26 Climate Summit Could be a Failure

The presidents of Russia, China and Brazil have already announced they will not be attending COP26 in Glasgow, while Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have not yet confirmed.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he worries the COP26 climate change summit will "go wrong" — after Russia, China and Brazil pulled out.

Speaking to an audience of children in the press room at 10 Downing Street, he admitted the outcome of the 13-day meeting of world leaders in the Scottish city of Glasgow — starting on Halloween — was "touch and go".

"We need as many people as possible to go to net zero so that they are not producing too much carbon dioxide by the middle of the century," Johnson said.

"Now, I think it can be done. It's going to be very, very tough, this summit. And I'm very worried, because it might go wrong and we might not get the agreements that we need," he added.

BoJo insisted he did not want to name and shame the world's 12 biggest users of plastics responsible for the "overwhelming bulk" of production — before singling out soft drinks giant Coca Cola.

"Coca-Cola, for instance, and others, which are responsible for producing huge quantities of plastic, and we've got to move away from that and we've got to find other ways of packaging and selling our stuff."

Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK chief executive Tanya Steele, a guest speaker, urged the public to re-use items like bags and bottles and "do a little bit of recycling".

But Johnson insisted with a bang of his fist that recycling was a "red herring".

"Recycling isn't the answer," he said. "it doesn't begin to address the problem. You can only recycle plastic a couple of times really. What you have got to do is stop the production of plastic, stop the first use of plastic."

Steele also appealed for humanity "to bring nature back", saying only three per cent of the Earth's surface was still wilderness.

"We could feed some of the human beings to the animals," BoJo jokingly responded, also mischievously suggesting municipal toothpaste dispensers and encouraging cows to stop burping as solutions to global warming.

The presidents of Russia, China and Brazil have already announced they will not be attending the summit, while Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and even Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have not yet confirmed.

Those six countries, all members of the G20 group of the world's largest economies, have a combined population of 2 billion people — a quarter of the human race — and represent a large part of the global economy.